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Tarrytown resident Rob Manfred elected MLB commissioner

Ronald Blum
11:01 p.m. EDT August 14, 2014

From left, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. "Bud" Selig, Major League Baseball chief operating officer Rob Manfred and St. Louis Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., chairman of a baseball commissioner succession committee, speak to reporters after team owners elected Manfred as the next commissioner of Major League Baseball during an owners quarterly meeting in Baltimore Thursday, August 14, 2014.(Photo: Steve Ruark AP)

BALTIMORE – Rob Manfred, a Tarrytown resident, was elected baseball's 10th commissioner Thursday, winning a three-man race to succeed Bud Selig and given a mandate by the tradition-bound sport to recapture young fans and speed play in an era that has seen competition increase and attention spans shrink.

Manfred, who has worked for Major League Baseball in roles with ever-increasing authority since 1998, will take over from Selig on Jan. 25. He beat out Boston Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner in the first contested vote for a new commissioner in 46 years. The third candidate, MLB Executive Vice President of Business Tim Brosnan, dropped out before the start of voting.

Manfred, 55, who grew up in Rome, New York — about an hour's drive from the Hall of Fame — has served as MLB's chief operating officer for the past year.

"There is no doubt in my mind he has the temperament, the training, the experience," Selig said. Selig turned 80 last month and has ruled baseball since September 1992, when he was among the owners who forced Commissioner Fay Vincent's resignation.

One baseball executive who attended the meeting and requested anonymity said Manfred was elected on approximately the sixth ballot. The initial vote was 20-10 for Manfred, three short of the required three-quarters majority. Though teams put written ballots into envelopes, keeping their choices secret, from team official speeches it appeared Tampa Bay, Milwaukee and finally Washington likely switched. Owners then made the final vote unanimous.

Werner was supported by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno. Other teams said Reinsdorf wanted a commissioner who would take a harsher stance in labor talks.

"What I said to the owners when I came down after the vote is that I didn't really want to even think about who was on what side of what issue at points in the process," Manfred said, "and that my commitment to the owners was that I would work extremely hard day in and day out to convince all 30 of them that they had made a great decision today."

Selig is the second-longest-serving head of baseball behind Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1920-44). The three candidates were picked by a seven-man succession committee chaired by St. Louis Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr.

Manfred has been involved in baseball since 1987, starting as a lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who assisted in collective bargaining. He became MLB's executive vice president for labor relations and human resources in 1998, received an expanded role of executive vice president of economics and league affairs in 2012 and last September was promoted to chief operating officer. He helped lead negotiations for baseball's past three labor contracts with players and the joint drug agreement that was instituted in 2002 and has been repeatedly strengthened.

Werner, 64, was controlling owner of the San Diego Padres from 1990-94, triggering fan criticism for the payroll-paring departures of Fred McGriff, Gary Sheffield, Tony Fernandez, Randy Myers and Benito Santiago. He has been part of the Red Sox ownership group since 2002, a period that includes three World Series titles. While working at ABC, he helped develop Robin Williams' "Mork & Mindy" and later was executive producer of "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne" at The Carsey-Werner Co.

MLB's last contested election for commissioner was after Spike Eckert was fired in December 1968. With the requirement then a three-quarters majority in both the American and National leagues, teams split between San Francisco Giants vice president Chub Feeney and Yankees president Michael Burke and failed to elect anyone in 19 ballots. Bowie Kuhn, counsel to baseball's Player Relations Committee, was elected commissioner pro-tem Feb. 4, 1969, with a one-year term. He was voted a seven-year term that August and served until October 1984, when he was replaced by Los Angeles Olympics head Peter Ueberroth.

Former Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti took over from Ueberroth in April 1989, died later that September and was replaced by his deputy commissioner, Fay Vincent. Selig, then the Milwaukee Brewers owner, teamed with Reinsdorf to head the group that pressured for Vincent's forced resignation in September 1992. Selig led baseball as head of the executive council for nearly six years, including the 7 1/2-month strike in 1994-95 that canceled the World Series. He repeatedly said he wouldn't take the job fulltime before he formally was voted commissioner in July 1998.